Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 19, 2007

Themes for Google Personalized Homepage

Google Personalized Homepage becomes a little bit more "customizable". Now you can select between the default theme and six other childish themes. Themes change the background, text colors, icons, Google's logo, button sizes and more.

The theme is actually an XML that contains a list of CSS files. Google says that the "theme will dynamically change to match your time of day, including local sunrise and sunset times", so you have to enter your location. If you look in the XML, you'll notice a lot of references to the weather, so it's likely that the theme will change depending on weather, as well.

Because the theme is actually just a CSS file (and its dependencies), Google could let users build their own themes and maybe even host those themes to improve the performance.

<< Google's new package of decorations, also known as "skins", are designed to make the home page feel even more homey, said Marissa Mayer, the company's vice president of search products and user experience.

"Google has become the doorway to the internet for a lot of people, so we want to make (the site) feel more like an online living room," Mayer said.

Reflecting its cautious approach, Google's first set of decorations consist of just six themes revolving mostly around landscapes. The settings include a Japanese tea garden, a beach, a city skyline and a bus stop. Google plans to introduce a few more themes each month and eventually may accept outside submissions, Mayer said. (...)

The designs also will contain hidden surprises known as "Easter eggs" that will open up with an opportune click at the right time of the day, Mayer said. >>

i like the new look, it's great. but the location of the sun doesn't work as i expect.there is a hint to complete the zip code, so i completed "bucharest, romania" but the sun location wasn't correct :D. they could give the user the possibility to complete the geographical coordinates, or at least the time zone (like EET, or UTC+2) if they don't provide weather forecast for the whole world.

Wow, I love these themes! They're only available on google.com/ig though. I also don't think the changing of the pictures works with postcodes and cities outside of the US, which is a bit of a shame. beautiful artwork though, and I'm sure they'll roll it out elsewhere before long. I was just thinking yesterday how sterile the personalised page looked!

The one thing that annoys me about Google IG is that the feeds don't update often enough. If you take the BBC News feed for example and compare it to how it displays as a gadget, many news items are missed out, and the order is completely wrong. This is true for many feeds that update regularly, and with the BBC one, for example, the order is important with the top stories being at the top of the feed. Google IG messes this up.

I'm sorry but, Ionut, your tip did not work for me. Instead, it just popped up a small empty blue box with one empty grey button that when clicked, closes the blue box. I'm guessing that empty grey button was a malformed "cancel" button. Apart from that, nothing else happens.

Pretty strange. I could see the option to change the theme in all the accounts I've tried and I'm not in the US. It probably depends on the data center (not all of them have the new code) you hit and it will be available to everyone in a short while.

I couldn't use this feature with my localized version(I'm from Poland), but once I changed the language to English, the "select theme" button appeared in the upper right corner and it works just fine.I guess typing "http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en" in the address bar might be the solution (I'm not sure tho :)

These are beautiful! I've been using the personalized homepage almost since it was first available, and I think this is the nicest addition yet. The only problem is I can't decide which one I like best. I think I'm on my third theme now, and it's the tea house theme because I think it's cute and my son will get a kick out of it. Having the ability to change the theme automatically would be a neat idea - every hour/day/week/month/etc., just have it select another one either at random or in a user-determined sequence.

For the record, I'm in Canada, and inputting my postal code seems to have worked - I set it on the Sweet Dreams theme last night, which featured a moon, and this morning the sun was up on it. Of course, this is still on the .com domain.

Try the time ones at 3:14am. This is (I presume) when it changes to something weird. 3:14, of course, is the first digits of pi, so this is why it is chosen (the sweet dreams theme has the greek letter pi in the sky made out of stars at 3:14).

If you can't be bothered waiting to 3:14 am, you can do this to apply the css:1. Get firefox with web developer toolbar2. press Ctrl-Shift-E to open the css editor.3. Open the correct css file. For example, the teahouse theme one is here: http://www.google.com/ig/skins/teahouse/teahouse_3.14am.css3. Copy the CSS from the file and switch back to the Google homepage, then paste it in the Edit CSS panel under Embedded styles.

It shouldn't be too hard to make a greasemonkey extension to do this stuff. (But I don't know how to)

It seems that there is also inconsistency in the Google gadgets that is highlighted by this theme change. The Calendar gadget font size is now much smaller than the rest of the page. The Google Reader gadget title is not bold and does not follow the theme when font color changes.

Background Overlay Imagehttp://www.google.com/ig/images/skins/THEME/TIME/header_bg.gif (This image is usually .GIF because it is uses transparency to overlay the background image, however sometimes it is overlaid without using transparency. In these cases the file is called header_bg.jpg).

I am using these themes for a long time but now I got a problem: everything was reset!!!!! And every time I try to setup everything as it was, when I choose the theme, everything is reset again.Is anyone having this problem as well?

Nice concept. The existing cute and childish themes are a good demonstration, but Google needs to add themes with a professional appearance. Even extending the theme across it's products for the logged on user.

iGoogle will not dislpay my themed page as a home page. It always reverts to the default Google and makes me sign in to iGoogle even though I have set my homepage to iGoogle (http://www.google.co.uk/ig?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&hl=en)Can anyone help?

I like this feature, and I created a really usable homepage.Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to install it.I can always go look at it at the website, but no luck in keeping it.I also cannot find any answers to why, nor any instructions.How does one contact a real person at Google?

These new homepage themes is a great idea, im stuck with my net reasearch 12 hours a day its refreshing to see such colorful and sweet images..like the teahouse....could it be even nicer if its animated???

I'm at a loss as to why people aren't able to use these themes. I've never had any problems since they debuted and I'm so pleased that there are new themes now (finally!). My current favorite is "Autumn" and I'm wondering if it'll change to "Winter" on 12/22!

my google theme seems to be working great it looks very appealing but i need an undo option. i had the theme already selected but was telling a friend f mines of this feature so removed my current theme. now i want the same theme back but can't locae it....dont even remember itz name:-(